Dell's new Inspiron 14 and 15 7000 series would otherwise be rather dull creatures and just a slight spec increase on what we saw last year. However with the new 1050 and 1050 Ti cards under the bonnet they are getting a huge gaming upgrade.

They come with a seventh-gen Core i5 7300HQ or Core i7 7700HQ quad core processor which is pretty much of a yawn and most of the good specs are exclusive to the 15-inch model. The 15-incher has a 512GB PCIe SSD, the Ti graphics, and a 74 watt-hour battery. It also has a 1080p or 4K IPS screen. The 14-inch model has a 1080p anti-glare LCD which is a bit of a snooze.

Neither has a USB-C like Lenovo's all-new Legion gaming laptops - which also feature the 1050 - but the Dell is about $100 cheaper which makes it a score.

If you want something a little more advanced Dell also just announced new Alienware laptops with higher-end graphics for a $999 starting price.

Many of our colleagues were writing about the shortage of Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080 and 1070 cards and they got things mostly right. Our multiple sources close to AIB partners told us that the 1080 is the bestselling high-end card in the history of GPU.

Everyone we talked to, outside of Nvidia of course, has confirmed that Geforce GTX 1080 launch was the biggest volume high end card launch, that was ever deceived by Nvidia at launch date. This got confirmed by both AIB and retail / etail sources and guess what, it all sold out in minutes. The numbers were much bigger than with Geforce GTX 980 or Ti launch, but it still sold within minutes.

If you read the Geforce GTX 1080 reviews, you will see that this is the largest performance delta in years, and that the card eats last year’s flagship Geforce GTX 980 Ti for breakfast. Following launch cards that got sold in minutes, Nvidia is shipping limited volume of cards on a daily basis but it seems that etail and retail guys are fulfilling the pre-orders with these cards.

Both Nvidia and AMD have an SRP, a suggested retail (etail) price but some vendors still decide to go and overcharge for the card. We are sure that there is a penalty mechanism for the ones that overdo it. There are no rules that will prevent you selling your newly acquired card on Ebay for $1000 or even more, and some people are taking advantage of it — even apparently some etailers.

Since AMD’s Radeon Fury X is not a real competitor and the Radeon Pro Duo is too expensive and hard to get, Nvidia is getting the most attention and is selling like hot cakes. The best comparion is like trying to buy an unlocked iPhone at the day of launch, it takes at least a few weeks to get your hands on it as Apple cannot fulfill the demand at launch.

The cheapest card we could find in the German market was the Gainward GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition selling for €729 which is actually below the suggested retail price. Still in the end, stores are the ones that are making the money on cards in stock and decide the final price. Nvidia suggested retail price for Geforce GTX 1080 in Europe with tax (€665) for partner card while Nvidia’s Geforce GTX 1080 Founders edition has a MSRP of 789 Euro. In this case, Gainward's card is cheaper from Nvidia's suggested retail price. Some cards are, such as the one from Inno3D, selling at Mindfactory for €780.32 which was the most expensive card listed as available at our favorite price matching website.

The Geforce GTX 1070 is a bit better. There are enough cards available in German market at least that average around €499 with tax with is exactly the suggested retail (etail price).

Earlier this month, we did an inventory check on US retailers and etailers who told us that supplies would not pick up until around mid-June. In case you are based in the US, we could not find a single card available at Newegg and EVGA was the least expensive with EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 DirectX 12 08G-P4-6181-KR 8GB 256-Bit GDDR5X PCI Express 3.0 SLI Support GAMING ACX 3.0 Graphics Card listed at $619.99, but not in stock.

It was funny to see Asus trying to get an advantage from these prices. The ASUS GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition GTX1080-8G 8GB GDDR5X PCI Express 3.0 is selling by Asus at Amazon for $869.00. the claim that they might have a card in stock in 10 days, June 30th.

Anadtech has managed to prove that Nvidia has less L2 Cache and less ROPs in Geforce GTX 970 than advertised.

The whole issue started as users realised that some of the GTX 970 could only allocate 3.5GB out of the total 4GB onboard. Nvidia has confirmed that Geforce GTX 970 is possessing “fewer crossbar resources to the memory system” than the GTX 980 and that the memory was segmented in different way on the weaker card. The way memory works with GTX 970 is that 3.5GB are allocated with higher priority segment and additional 512MB are serving as low priority segment.

Things got interesting as Editor in Chief of Anandtech Ryan Smith reports that Senior VPs like Jonah Alben were on the phone over the weekend to answer the questions about architecture. Smith knows how to put engineers and technical marketing guys on a hot seat. Nvidia explained that technical documentation that got to reviewers had errors and the technical marketing, product management, and engineering, architectural personnel didn’t work out the better way to explain the problem.

The issue occurs at very high resolutions like 4K 3840x2160 and if get the game to use more than 3.5GB of memory. For example in Battlefield 4 you can see as much as 50 percent drop from 30 FPS with less than 3.5GB setting = 3840x2160 2xMSAA to 15 FPS with more than 3.5GB setting = 3840x2160 135% res. You can notice a huge drop in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare or Shadows of Mordor.

We are sure that some end users won't be happy with Nvidia about this lack or truth probably resulting with some returns but it is a fact that you won't play any serious game with 3840x2160 with high settings and a single GTX 970 card.

Last week was all about the Geforce GTX 960 launch and we had a chance to take a closer look at this Maxwell GPU from Nvidia.

The price is right, but we have noticed is that AMD already has a lot of competition in this price range. There is no doubt, the Geforce GTX 960 is the most power efficient card in this segment, but AMD offers similar or lower prices for more powerful cards.

The Radeon R9 280X is selling for as little as $169.99 with a $20 rebate and both Sapphire and Power Color are offering these cards at such low prices. The cheapest Radeon R9 285 with 2GB that comes really close or beats theGeforce GTX 960 sells for $189.99 after a $30.00 rebate card. This is a really competitive price.

Nvidia is offering Geforce GTX 960 for $199 and more, depending on the speed and SKU. This is a good deal, but as we just pointed out AMD still has good cards up its sleeve, pardon the pun. The Geforce GTX 960 needs less power, but if power is not a big issue, AMD has nice alternatives that perform significantly better at higher settings and resolutions, according to our own benchmarks.

We just wanted to give you an update on the state of the mainstream segment. Nvidia still faces stiff competition from AMD. While the aforementioned Radeons don't exactly offer the latest and greatest technology, they perform well in games and need more energy to keep going.

Competition creates pressure and results in lower pricing, which is good news for consumers. There is no bad choice, as both Nvidia and AMD have great cards and price wars are always nice, at least as far as end users go. It is good to know that any of these three mentioned cards will run games at 1080p just fine, but you will most likely need to spend more than $199 to play at 2640x1440 or 3840x2160.

In fact, you will need to spend quite a bit more if you are into 4K gaming.

The memory overclock really does much to increase gaming results, and GLH is faster that many GTX 960 competitors cards which have higher GPU clock, but no memory overclock. This was a good call on Gainward’s part.

Nvidia just launched the GTX 960 series, the first mainstream graphics card based on the company’s Maxwell architecture and we are playing with a few samples, including Gainward’s GTX 960 Phantom GLH (Goes Like Hell) card.

The GLH card looks like many other Gainward cards with the trademark Phantom cooler, as it is not a new design – the cooler is used on the GTX 760 Phantom card and GTX 970 Phantom card, but this is not a bad thing. Actually, it’s a good thing since this is a great cooler, but the downside is that it takes up 2.5 slots in your rig.

The Phantom’s fans are hidden behind the heatsink, so it may trick the casual observer into thinking that it’s a passive cooler. Still, if you peek through the heatsink fins, you’ll see the silhouettes of the fans. The shroud looks nice, but it is plastic. The GTX 970 Phantom card is 247mm long and 112mm high.

The fans can be removed without removing the heatsink or messing with the wiring. You just need to undo a single screw and pull the fan out of the heatsink. This clever trick was introduced on Gainward’s Kepler generation cards and it saves a lot of time if you need to clean your card.

The Phantom cooler is can keep the temperature below 69 degrees Celsius despite high factory overclock. More importantly, the card is quiet all the time. Gainward did not implement Nvidia’s new Fan Stop Mode feature (which stops the fan in idle) but the GTX 960 Phantom GLH is inaudible in idle mode anyway. Our measurements can confirm that in idle the GPU temperature of the GLH stays below 32 degrees Celsius and the card is totally silent. When it’s idling, the fans spin at about 800RPM, as you can see from the GPUZ screenshots below.

The GTX 960 Phantom GLH works at a base clock of 1279MHz, while the reference GPU base clock is 1126MHz. Nvidia's GPU Boost 2.0 takes the average GPU clock to 1342MHz for the reference GPU and to 1304MHz for the Phantom card.

The reference GTX 960 has a TDP of 120W and the GLH will consume a little bit more due to the factory overclock. Both cards use one 6-pin power connector. For comparison, the GTX 980 has a TDP of 165W and just like the GTX 970 it requires two 6-pin power connectors.

Like the Geforce GTX 980, the Geforce GTX 960 has a new display engine capable of supporting resolutions up to 5K with up to four simultaneous displays (including support for up to four 4K MST displays). GeForce GTX 960 also supports HDMI 2.0, and with added support for H.265 (HEVC) encoding and decoding.

The GTX 960 Phantom GLH is good card for gamers on a budget who are keen to play at 1080p with plenty of eye candy. The factory overclock brings better performance out of the box. The Gainward card comes with a 153MHz GPU overclock, and what we really like is the 50MHz (200MHz effective) memory overclock. The memory overclock really does much to increase gaming results, and GLH is faster that many GTX 960 competitors cards which have higher GPU clock, but no memory overclock. This was a good call on Gainward’s part.

We will proceed to run more tests and the full review will be available soon.

In addition to the Geforce GTX 980, Nvidia has also launched the new Geforce GTX 970 graphics card. Based on a cut-down version of the same GM204 GPU that is behind the Geforce GTX 980, is aiming to be the performance per buck king by putting a lot of pressure on AMD's Radeon R9 290. According to Nvidia, it is able to run many games at UHD/4K resolution with enjoyable frame rates and at a decent level of detail.

While the Geforce GTX 980 is based on a fully enabled GM204 Maxwell GPU, Nvidia has to cut down that same GPU on the Geforce GTX 970, but not by much. Featuring the same 2MB of L2 cache and 64 ROPs like the GTX 980, the Geforce GTX 970 packs same four Graphics Processing Clusters (GPCs) but with 13 Stream Maxwell Multiprocessors (SMMs), which add up to 1664 CUDA cores and 104 Texture Units (TMUs). The clocks of the GTX 970 have taken a dive as well, down to 1050MHz for the base GPU clock and 1178MHz for the GPU Boost clock. The memory on the other hand remained at same 4GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 7000MHz, which paired up with the same 256-bit memory interface, add up to the same 224GB/s of memory bandwidth, just like the GTX 980.

Of course, these are the reference clocks for the Geforce GTX 970 and as Nvidia gave a green light to its AIB partners to come up with a custom design from day one, we will definitely see some rather impressive factory-overclocks, as well as some impressive overclocking headroom thanks to custom coolers and GM204's excellent overclocking potential.

The Geforce GTX 970 also comes with all new features, courtesy of the GM204 Maxwell GPU, as well as the same display output configuration, including three DisplayPort, HDMI 2.0 and dual-link DVI outputs.

With lower clocks and slightly "weaker" GPU, the Geforce GTX 970 also has a lower 145W compared to the GTX 980. It still needs two 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors and also comes with the same dual-slot blower style cooler seen on the GTX 980, at least on the reference design.

Nvidia is also doing a hard launch with the Geforce GTX 970 as well and since AIB partners had a green light for custom designs, we should see plenty of Geforce GTX 970 graphics cards on retail/e-tail shelves as of day one.

The biggest surprise is definitely the price as Nvidia decided to launch the Geforce GTX 970 with a US $329 price tag in the US. The European MSRP is set at €270,00. These prices put the Geforce GTX 970 blow the AMD Radeon R9 290 and judging from the first reviews, outperforms it and brings a new level of performance per Watt.

You can check out some reviews below and our review is coming up shortly in case you want to check out a quite impressive EVGA GTX 970 SC ACX 2.0 graphics card.

Following the announcement of Nvidia's new bundle which include Ubisoft's Watch Dogs game with purchase of select Geforce GTX graphics cards from GTX Titan, GTX 700 and GTX 600 series, EVGA has announced that it will be a part of that bundle program as well.

EVGA will offer Ubisoft's Watch Dogs game for free with purchase of EVGA Geforce GTX 660 and above graphics card. In case you missed it earlier, Ubisoft's Watch Dogs game will offer some rather impressive graphics detail with NVidia's exclusive TXAA antialiasing, HBAO+ as well as 4K Surround technology, as well as allow users to share their Watch Dogs gameplay via Geforce Shadowplay or optimize the game with a single-click with Geforce Experience.

You can check out more details regarding EVGA Watch Dogs game bundle here and see more about Nviida's Watch Dogs bundle details here.

Nvidia and AMD both apparently agree that 4K gaming is the new big thing and Nvidia has now announced the new Geforce GTX Battlebox program that should, in cooperation with multiple system builders, bring "a new breed of gaming machine" that would be able to deliver playable framerates at 4K resolution, high settings and with all Nvidia-exclusive features.

Teaming up with the likes of Maingear, Origin, Digital Storm, CyberPowerPC, Scan Computers and many others, a system with the aforementioned Geforce GTX Battlebox badge will pack an overclocked Intel Haswell Core i5/i7 CPU paired up with high-speed DDR3 RAM, latest high-speed SSDs, advanced cooling system to cope up with heat and of course, Geforce GTX 780 or GTX Titan GPUs in 2- or 3-way SLI configurations.

All of this will be running on 3840x2160 UHD monitors in order to bring impressive eye-candy and image quality. According to Nvidia, SLI will deliver a flawless experience thanks to exclusive frame metering technologies, unlike other multi-GPU configurations. When it comes to monitors, Nvidia only talks about Asus 31.5" PQ321Q but also noted that we can expect a host of new models in the near future.

The GTX Battlebox systems will also feature a new SLI Bridge with illuminated GTX Claw logo that should "perfectly match the GTX Titan, GTX 780 and GTX 770 graphics cards and exclusively be available with Battlebox systems.

It is quite clear that both AMD and Nvidia agree that 4K/UHD is definitely the future, unfortunately, Nvidia's approach to it will definitly be expensive. While AMD is pushing Mantle API in order pull the most performance and features out of the GPU, Nvidia teams up with system builders to build an ultimate and most likely quite expensive gaming systems, something that DIY users, which basically live for the day when they get to plug in their new piece of hardware that they assembled with care, will not appreciate.

In any case, GTX Battlebox systems will be arriving shortly so we will just have to wait and see how well it goes.

Arctic has announced that a total of three high performance coolers from its stables can cope with Nvidia's recently launched Geforce GTX Titan.

The Accelero Twin Turbo II, Accelero Xtreme III and the integrated air and liquid cooler, the Accelero Hybrid can all cope with the thermal output of the GTX Titan, while at the same time delivering less noise than reference cooling. It is pretty hard to market an aftermarket cooler for the GTX Titan as Nvidia did a hell of job in designing a special cooler for it, which is actually a reason why we will not see many "custom cooled" Titans on the market (excluding EVGA's watercooled one).

In case you still want a bit more cooling power, the Accelero Hybrid, Accelor Xtreme III and the Accelero Twin Turbo II will certainly be enough to keep the beast at bay.

Following the recent AMD push with its Never Settle bundle deal, Nvidia has announced its own Free 2 Play bundle available with select Geforce GTX GPUs.

Although it does not offer impressive AAA titles like Crysis 3, Bioshock: Infinite, new Tomb Raider and others, seen in the AMD's Never Settle Reloaded bundle, it still adds US $75-$150 value to Geforce GTX 650 and higher end graphics cards. The bundle focuses on Free 2 Play games that, according to Nvidia, generate much more revenue when compared to the AAA titles.

The Geforce Free 2 Play bundle includes up to US $150 value of in-game currency in Hawken, World of Tanks and PlanetSide 2 games. The deal gets you US $75 of in-game currency for a GTX 650 or 650 Ti and US $150 for a GTX 660 or any other more expensive graphics card. The first one gets you 2050 Gold and 1 month premium in World of Tanks, "Gear Up pack" in Planetside 2 and 3600 Meteor credit in Hawken, while the US $150 one gets you 7500 Gold and 1 month premium in World of Tanks, "Premium Gear Up pack" in Planetside 2 and 7200 Meteor credit in Hawken.

In case you are one of the many that are enjoying these F2P games then your next upgrade might just well be an Nvidia based Geforce GTX graphics card.